Career[edit]

While Wayne did television guest shots on I Spy (as the title character in the episode "Trouble With Temple"), Bewitched, I Dream of Jeannie (as dim-witted starlet "Bootsie Nightingale"), Love American Style, Emergency! and The Fall Guy, she also appeared in many sketches on The Red Skelton Show. She gained her greatest fame for 100-plus appearances (1971–1982) as the buxom Matinée Lady on The Tonight Show in Johnny Carson's popular Art Fern's Tea Time Movie sketches. After her death, Carson kept the Art Fern character off the air for most of the next year. He eventually hired Danuta Wesley and later Teresa Ganzel to be his new Matinée Lady.

In 1984, Wayne appeared in a nude pictorial for Playboy magazine. That same year, she filed for bankruptcy.[1]

Personal life[edit]

Wayne was married three times. Her first husband was Loreto (Larry) Cera, her second husband was rock and roll photographer Barry Feinstein (the father of her only son, Alex), and her third husband was television and film producer Burt Sugarman, who served as producer on Celebrity Sweepstakes.[1] Wayne told Johnny Carson in a 1974 interview that she enjoyed gardening and growing bonsai trees.

Death[edit]

In January 1985, Wayne and her companion Edward "Ed" Durston were vacationing at the Las Hadas Resort in Manzanillo, Colima, Mexico. After an argument with Durston, Wayne reportedly left to take a walk on the beach. Three days later a local fisherman found Wayne's body in the shallow bay.[2]

Authorities later discovered Durston had checked out of the resort the day the couple argued. He had left Wayne's luggage at the airport. An autopsy performed in Mexico revealed no signs of drugs or alcohol in Wayne's body.[2] Her death was eventually ruled as "accidental".[3]

Durston was linked earlier to another high-profile and controversial death: On October 4, 1969, Diane Linkletter, the youngest child of American TV media personality Art Linkletter, jumped out of a window of her sixth floor apartment at the Shoreham Towers in West Hollywood, California. Durston was present in Linkletter's apartment the morning of her death.[4][5] Durston was never an official suspect in either case.